Does human intuition have any place in evaluating software?

Uh, that would be ‘yes’.

What did your intuition tell you about the people who were demonstrating the product?

You just spent quite a few hours and possibly days (weeks?) with the vendor’s representatives, which may include senior executives, and maybe the firm’s founder and president.

Were they straightforward? Did you feel like they were honestly listening to you? Did they ever say something was their fault? You developed some sort of vibe about the company, and one of the things you need to take into consideration is whether you had a group vibe about the sort of company the software vendor is. How do you evaluate this vibe? You don’t. But you discuss it as a group and make sure it is one of your X-factors at the end of the evaluation effort. In 1990, I led my first evaluation effort.  One of the software vendor’s demonstrations was horrible.  So horrible that the two sales reps actually got into a fight over who was going to continue to lead the disaster…culminating in them each putting their hands on the keyboard and doing the push-pull thing.  Each trying to wrestle control of the keyboard (this was before the ‘mouse’). Our collective vibe told us that we needed to give them a second shot – with different sales professionals.  The scoring for this vendor was a zero. 

Long story, short.  The vendor did come back – brought the president of the software company with them, and did in fact win the account.  A large part of this was due to the damage control that they did…but in a small part due to the project team using their eyes and ears to do the right thing, and not JUST depending on the evaluation methodology.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 10:29 am and is filed under Software Evaluation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.